I’m fond of musing out loud that if given the choice of leaving my child with a politician or a paedophile I’d be hard pressed to choose the politician.

Hyperbole, of course, meant to shock. Such, however, is the contempt I have for the political class.

Besides my father, I claim no heroes in my life. The list of people I look up to isn’t much longer.

If you claim any politician as your hero, or someone you look up to, then all I can do is offer my most profound pity and sympathy. Few things are uglier than watching your illusions shatter.

Do yourself a favour: save your illusions for your children. 

With newspapers dying—and the Fourth Estate in general undergoing a crisis of relevance—is it any surprise that illnesses become pandemics overnight . . . that Al Gore’s siren song is preached from news desks with apocalyptic fervour . . . that minor blips become major crises before “crossroads” or “points of no return” are in any danger of ever being reached?

Maintain your sanity by never forgetting the Fourth Estate’s philosophy: “Shriek the loudest to reach the biggest audience!”

Funnily enough, the louder they shriek, the more I shut them out. After all, silence is golden.

Know how the dinosaurs figured out they were extinct? They never did; they just were.

The news keeps getting better for my dearly departed England:

The full scale of the tax crackdown on the rich became clear yesterday as details emerged of a fresh Labour raid on pensions.

Hidden in the small print of Alistair Darling’s Budget are plans to tax anyone earning more than £150,000 on payments their employer makes into their company pension. The measure sets a precedent in the taxation of pensions and would give the Treasury an extra £2.9 billion a year—equivalent to almost a penny on the basic rate of income tax. . . .

Pension experts warned that the new regime—taxing pension contributions as if they were a benefit in kind—could finish off the few remaining final-salary schemes.

Sink, Brittania, and sink quickly to spare us all those painful, withdrawn good-byes.

Many years have regrettably passed since I last read a Richard Russo novel (the late ’80s, when I devoured Mohawk and The Risk Pool back to back). Needless to say, it’s been a real pleasure to lose myself in the small-town lives that Russo draws so expertly, with both compassion and humour, in Nobody’s Fool:

Carl Roebuck wondered how Sully could stand to work with Rub, but in truth, Rub was one of the few people he’d ever been able to work with. Rub was the perfect dance partner, always content to let Sully, or whoever he was working with, lead. The beauty of Rub was that he had no agenda of his own. If Sully was in a hurry or had somewhere to go, another job to do when this one was finished, hauling ass was fine with Rub. If for some reason—like they were being paid by the hour—they needed to go slow, then Rub was even more of a marvel the way he was able to stay in motion without accomplishing anything. Rub was a perfect laborer, born to follow orders, not minding in the least when he was told to do things wrong, able to convey the impression of progress even as he ensured that the job wouldn’t get done today. If need be, you could rest easy that the job wouldn’t get done until there was another one to replace it. All of this without ever appearing to stall or even rest. Sully always maintained that if you had ten guys working on a rock pile, Rub would be the last you’d fire for laziness. Only when you’d fired all the others would you realize that Rub had not yet addressed his first rock.

Russo’s a true craftsman.

Paper Cuts lists Norman Mailer’s choice of “Ten Favorite American Novels” as of January 1988:

• USA, John Dos Passos *
• Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain *
• Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell
• Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
• The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck *
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald *
• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway *
• Appointment in Samarra, John O’Hara
• The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain
• Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville *

Of the six I’ve read (*), I’d recommend John Dos Passos’ USA (ever so slightly) above the rest. It’s a great list, but USA continues to haunt the writer in me.

This epic trilogy is also one of the least familiar titles, something you generally don’t see on a high school (or, I guess, nowadays) college reading list. Fiction doesn’t get much better than Dos Passos’ masterpiece.

Pity my poor England, once again:

Thirty-five years ago, Denis Healey made good on his pledge to “squeeze the rich”, and put up the top rate of income tax to 83 per cent. Rather than get squeezed, many of the rich simply moved to countries with lower taxes and better climates.

Yesterday, Alistair Darling put the top rate of tax up to 50 per cent. Many predict the same result as in 1974. Tax advisers say that the change moves Britain to near the top of the world league for tax on the rich and warn that the rise will cause serious damage to the economy.

Yet the move will not raise a huge sum for the Exchequer. For cynics it looks suspiciously like a ploy to distract attention from the scale of the crisis in Britain’s public finances revealed by the Chancellor yesterday. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, described the changes as clever political taxes on the rich. . . .

Many other countries have been reducing their top rates recently, and the accountancy firm Ernst & Young said that yesterday’s rise will move Britain from nineteenth to seventh in the league of highest marginal rates. It is not just those earning more than £150,000 who will face high rates. Because of the removal of personal allowances, those earning £100,000 will pay 60p in tax for every extra pound that they make.

Sixty pence for every extra pound they make. That’s vile. I hope “the rich” bail out of England as quickly as possible and let Britannia sink once and for good.

So my yanqui friends want nationalised healthcare?

A three-year-old girl awaiting heart surgery has had her operation cancelled three times this month because of a shortage of beds.

Ella Cotterell was due to have aorta-widening surgery on Monday at the Children’s Hospital, Bristol. But 48 hours beforehand, the operation was cancelled for the third time as all 15 beds in the intensive care unit were occupied, her parents said.

A hospital spokesman said that procedures would be reviewed, but the case highlights a growing problem of cancelled operations in the NHS.

More than 57,000 surgeries were postponed for non-clinical reasons, including a lack of beds, last year—10 per cent more than the previous year.

I can’t imagine what Ella’s parents are going through. This is not a road anyone should be forced to go down.